Daegan Miller writes:

“What is the subject of our thought? Experience! Nothing else! And if we lose the ground of experience then we get into all kinds of theories.”

— Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt first fled the Nazis in 1933. It was a harrowing escape: she had just been released from the Gestapo prison in Berlin after eight days of interrogation for collecting evidence of German anti-Semitism from the stacks of the Prussian State Library. She knew she had little time before there was another knock at the door, and so she packed the single suitcase that would accompany her through the forests of the Erzgebirge Mountains to Czechoslovakia. Inside it were the few precious possessions she could not bear to leave behind: birth certificate, passport, marriage documents, doctoral diploma, some letters, the manuscript of the biography she was writing about the German Jewish intellectual Rahel Varnhagen, and twenty-one hand-penciled poems she had written between 1923 and 1926.

Arendt fled first to Prague, then to Geneva, and then spent eight years in Paris. The poems were with her when she was interned at Gurs—for she was a German Jew, and France was at war with the country of her birth—and when she escaped from that camp as the Nazis again closed in, she walked across France with them, crossed into Spain at Portbou, and made it to Lisbon. In May 1941, she shipped across the Atlantic to New York City, her poems again in her small suitcase, a few lines of Shakespeare supposedly the only English in her mouth, and twenty-five dollars in her pocket.

She would pen a few poems, always in German, most every year for the next two decades. “Eventide descends once more,” she wrote in a 1942 poem dedicated to her friend Walter Benjamin, who died by suicide rather than fall into Nazi hands. “Night falls down from the stars; / We stretch our limbs reaching out / To those near, and those far.” Though she never published her poems, she bound the first thirty-six into two small fascicles sometime after her arrival in the US—though few readers showed interest until recently. [Continue reading…]